The Blonde (11 page)
“How?”
“I asked what it felt like to have a father.”
“And?”
“And he said it felt like never being good enough.” Suddenly her eyes were open and her heart skidded.
On the other end of the wire, a low whistle. “He told you that?”
“Yeah, well … I think it just slipped out.”
“Good work, my dear.”
“Huh?”
“He’s a Kennedy. They are extremely clannish; they never talk about family with strangers. But he did with you.”
“You mean, that’s good information? Information you can use?”
“Very good.” He was speaking to her as gently as he had that first day at Schwab’s.
“I’m done, then.” Wonder filled her chest. “I can meet my father soon?”
A faint sound, as though Alexei were clucking his tongue. When he spoke again it was still gently, but this time in the way people are gentle when they break bad news. “Oh, no, my dear. You’re the girl Jack Kennedy will talk to. This is only the beginning. But for now just try to get some sleep, all right?”
“But I’ll meet him soon?”
“Kennedy?”
“My father.”
“Soon enough. But in the meantime, proceed slowly, as you would with any man. When you are in New York next we will go over some precautions, some rules about how you and I should contact each other. As for Jack, the best thing you can do now is forget him. Spying is not unlike seduction, which you understand perfectly—if you move too quickly, you ruin the
mystique. Always hold the thing your mark wants a little out of reach—a man is never so naked as when the thing he wants is just out of reach—and always let him come to you. Anyway, Jack will be most useful to us if he wins the presidency, and we must be careful that your affair builds slowly, not peter out before he reaches highest office. For now we must play the long game and be patient. Can you be patient, my dear?”
What had she ever been but patient? She’d waited her whole life to meet her father, surely she could keep herself hard and cold a little longer. She was already hard and cold. She couldn’t feel her hands, but watched them put the phone back on its hook. Beyond a row of bushes she heard a girl laughing, and then a man calling after her, “Oh, baby, are you gonna get it!” The sound of one body’s splash as it broke the surface of the pool, and then a second one. Everywhere across the country, men were chasing women like that, and now she was one of them—a hunter.
New York, May 1960
THE apartment was empty, and the herringbone parquet stretched out from beneath the points of her high-heeled shoes, unprotected by the clutter of real life. Through the window of her taxi she had seen the trees blossoming on Park Avenue, the women strolling in slimming trousers with no socks. She had smelled the air—the dirty sweet mingling of chlorophyll and car exhaust that was the first warm gust of summer in the city. But the apartment was empty—she heard how empty when she set her suitcase down by the front door, crossed to the kitchen, and found the note pinned to the icebox with a magnet:
Went out
.
Arthur had forgotten, or maybe just not bothered, to close the curtains to the daytime sun. The air inside was stuffy and hot, and she fanned herself with his note as she dropped ice cubes into a cut-crystal tumbler and poured bourbon over them. The apartment was not empty of bourbon—so perhaps he did love her a little still.
Her shoes pinched her toes, but she did not want to take them off. It seemed romantic to her, or anyway appropriate, to stand there in the kitchen, the light fading from the day but none of the electric kind turned on, the props that made her legs look so especially feminine squeezing the blood away from her manicured feet. It was her birthday in less than a month, and she doubted she would be celebrating with her husband. Already the lonesome birthday blues played softly in her thoughts. She would be thirty-four—another year gone by, and what had it done, except tire her?
There was no child, and no father, either. And while she still told herself
that they would both be hers soon, these bedtime stories had taken on the tone of stale ritual. It had been more than a year since she met Jack Kennedy at Mosey Moses’s party, and she had only heard from him a few times since, and Alexei’s promise had begun to seem as illusory as the ones she made to herself. She’d had an affair with a costar, and though Arthur hadn’t accused her of anything, she had not bothered to hide it from him, or anybody else, for that matter. The movie had been called
Let’s Make Love
, and she and Yves had been good little actors and done like the title said, so who could be surprised? Perhaps Arthur truly didn’t know, but this was a possibility she shied from. That he was no fool was the reason she’d married him. Meanwhile, she had won a Golden Globe—not the Oscar she deserved, though it nonetheless should have counted for something, some confirmation of her years of slaving—but the award and the ceremony and the press notices scarcely seemed like events in her own life. Had she been happy, clutching her statuette, breathing into the microphone like a grateful idiot the names of all the people who had hindered her? The bourbon was cool down her throat and harsh in her sinuses; for both of these, she gave thanks.
The day had begun in California, where she had briefly forgotten herself in the twist of hotel sheets and hazy morning sun filtering through blinds and the smell of a man clinging to her skin. Her troubles, and her obligations. The man himself had still been there, sitting in the armchair by the open front door of the bungalow, his dark brow in a pensive, Gallic knot. He had been smoking, thinking—no doubt, and also rather predictably—about his wife in France, where he would be landing sometime that night, and how to win her back. Marilyn had pushed herself up on an elbow, a loose, white-blonde curl in her eye and the sheet wrapped girlishly over her breasts.
It would have been easy to bring him back. She’d seen exactly how to play it—with what winks and baby tones she could win his attention, draw him into bed, keep the game going another few hands. But he had never been more than a distraction to her, and in that capacity he was no longer useful.
His mind was already ahead of their fling, and his guilt made him tedious. Anyway, she had mostly pursued the affair in order to distract Arthur, so that if he suspected one infidelity, he would be blind to the other, more consequential one—to the affair she intended to have with Jack, which he couldn’t know about.
The phone rang just as she was refilling her glass. Ordinarily this would have been a welcome sound, the insistent trill of someone wanting her. But at that moment, with a fresh drink and the honeyed end of daylight making her loneliness seem almost gorgeous, she would rather have gone on like that forever, not knowing who was on the other line. It might be Arthur; perhaps he had secured a dinner date with someone important and wanted to show her off. Or maybe it was Yves—laid over at Idlewild and weepy with regret—calling for a final reassurance that he was only human and nobody could blame him. In fact, nobody
could
blame him. From the moment she’d seen Yves Montand’s one-man show she’d known exactly how she was going to use him, and then had gone about doing it so expertly that everyone was left with the vague impression it was he who had used her. Or maybe the caller was Joe, or Norman, or Marlon, or who knows, maybe it was even Kennedy, and she’d have a reason to roll on after all.
Gripping her glass she went through the apartment, past its white walls and high, grand moldings.
A real intellectual’s apartment
, she’d thought when she first saw it, and that was how their parties had been when they were first married, everybody smoking and talking, a pot of something on the stove so that guests could help themselves when they got hungry. Now Arthur had removed much of the furniture, taken it up to Connecticut on some spurious pretext. Something about how it would be good for her to redecorate the place in her own taste, a nice project for her. And why should she care? It was almost comforting to think how she’d never had a home, and that she never would.
The phone was still ringing when she sat down on the kitchen chair where
Arthur must have had his morning coffee. The paper lay beside it, folded neatly and less the theater section, and she picked up the front page. The phone stopped. The headline was about Kennedy—she was only a little surprised to find the name of the person that her mind had been so concerned with of late, there in the news. She skimmed the article, and learned that her mark had won the Democratic primary in West Virginia. So: He had been busy, and she was glad, for the first time in weeks, that she had kept busy, too, with the Frenchman on the Coast.
Suddenly she wanted to know who had been trying to reach her. But before she lifted the receiver, the phone rang again. This time she picked up right away.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.” The accent was disguised—he sounded jovial and blandly American. “Feel like a walk?”
Her mouth flexed, and before she could help it she was smiling. When had Alexei become so reassuring to her, the placid diction she hoped to hear on the line? Even masked it was familiar and happy-making. There were times, over the last year, when she thought maybe she was getting rather more out of the bargain than he was. Once she’d mused aloud if she should worry about winding up in prison or something, and he had assured her that he would never ask her to do anything dangerous, or even particularly illegal. All he wanted, he promised, was to understand the psyche of the man who might run the country—that was how peace was maintained in a new kind of war, he explained, so in a sense what she did for him would benefit the whole of mankind. She had only to pay attention as she would in any love affair, learn his peculiarities and preferences, and in return Alexei would watch over her, protect her, care for her, and introduce her to the man she had been seeking her whole life. Thus far she’d only had a minor fling like so many others, and here was Alexei, like clockwork, concerned about her welfare.
She was about to ask him if he’d been calling a moment ago, but then she remembered the lessons he’d given over the last year. Never underestimate what an effective tool silence can be was one of them, or what you may inadvertently reveal with even the most casual utterance.
“It’s lovely out now,” he went on, hopefully. “I’m down on the corner.”
“I don’t have much time.”
“Just a walk.”
“Okay.” She took another sip of bourbon, in order to more effectively put the smile away, and hung up the phone.
In the shadowy back corners of bars, he’d lectured her on various aspects of the clandestine arts, but she’d needed no lessons in the power game of tardiness. She moved unhurriedly through the quiet apartment, kicking off her heels and unzipping her pencil skirt and dropping it on the floor. Lena, her maid, would pick them up later. In the bathroom, she peeled the false eyelashes from her eyelids and turned the faucet on. The water felt good against her skin, and she lingered there taking off the face that she had put on that morning to say good-bye to Yves. When she lifted her head out of the sink she saw in the mirror—it still surprised her, no matter how much time passed—what they had done. How they had pinched the nose and shaved the chin. She still had fine, girlish skin, and without makeup she saw clearly the remains of her old face, that beautiful child everyone had wanted to touch.
In the dressing room, she put on a loose-knit white sweater and black slacks, shuffled into her driving moccasins, and with her hair pulled back under the black headband she used to wash her face, she left the apartment. It no longer amazed her that people recognized her less, almost not at all, when she looked most like herself.
The sky was turning purple, but the air was warm. She moved up the sidewalk at an efficient stride that did not invite stares. She was as anonymous as the day she was born, and as she came to the corner—to the pay phone
where she knew she would find him—the world for once took no notice. They did not need to speak. He saw her and waited, and she managed to keep her smile subtle and mysterious as she accepted his offered arm.
Without discussion they ambled toward the river. His trench coat was open, his blue dress shirt unbuttoned to the neck, and his tie put away. They might have been any couple, so pleased to be in each other’s company at the end of day that words were unnecessary. The only sign of their true relationship came when they reached the height of the pedestrian bridge that spanned the FDR and he glanced back. It was a casual gesture, but afterward, as they descended to the promenade, she felt safe in the certainty that they had not been followed.
“Tell me how you’ve been,” he asked, in his real voice. The accent, at once both clotted and lyrical, seemed of a piece with the gleaming lavender surface of the river spreading out toward Queens.
“All right.”
“Really?” He nodded at a woman walking a standard poodle on a leash as she passed. When she was gone, he went on: “You seem tired.”
“I look that bad?” A sad, soft laugh.
“No.”
“I’m done with shooting, thank god. Glad to be away from Los Angeles. I’ll have to go back soon—for
The Misfits
, this time.”
“How is Arthur?”
She exhaled. “I don’t know. We aren’t like that with each other anymore.”
“Do you want to leave him?”
“Sometimes.” She wanted to leave him, but she didn’t want to be divorced. “He pretends he’s too good for pictures, but really he’s jealous of what I can do and he can’t. He knows I’m his best bet to get into pictures, and he wants me for his movie. That’s all he wants me for now.”